Poems of Nature and Humankind

Katherine Holmes
How a Vine Staves Off Eviction

One inevitable day the landlord
will decide that the time has come

to pull the rug out from under
a vagrant vine-man’s feet.

He’ll slide down from where he stands,
a man-effigy of tree topiary from his spine,

excessive vine shot upright into
a lifesize leaf-attired scarecrow

king, green and disputed, astride
branchtops in a Dionysian diadem,

Adam-alone, stitched in spring and
making his peaceable wingy speech

all the swank swarming season and
the limb-extended gesticulation:

lo, I will be with you until I am
Beaujolais-bloodshot, crimson-cloaked

then in the storm-tatters and gashes
of summerless lamentation. And a

stick-figure antenna, all wired-up and
wraith-white in winter, to appear again.

Though anyone at the feathery fir can
prophesy with angel-strength the pulling

down of spring sculpture. Some vines
can’t be kept from another ascent.